01 April 2008

Letters From the Edge

Today I'm going to write a letter; a letterto all our readers. I'm also going to include a transcript of a veryinteresting letter sott.net has received from Prof. Victor Clube. Ihope that these letters will change your life, your future, and mine aswell.

Here at sott.net, we have been pretty busy working on our legaldefense, as if you couldn't guess! I'm sure that everyone notices thatwe are nowhere near our goal for having enough funds to cover thisexpense. All of you just remember, if 1,000 people can donate $100.00each, we are in the clear. If 2,000 people donate $50. each, we are inthe clear. And certainly, with over 10,000 of you reading this siteevery day, we ought to be able to do that!

Just keep in mind what you would be missing if we were gone! Whoelse would spend days, weeks, months and even years digging down to thedeepest levels of our reality to bring you reports and analyses of whatis really going on? After all, it is not just a matter of the politicalchaos out there; there are cosmic reasons for that chaos and historicalcycles demonstrate clearly that times such as these generally manifestother symptoms that we all need to be aware of. For example...

"The very controversial debate about Upheaval Dome's origin has lasted nearly a century,over the course of which extremely different hypotheses (gradualismversus catastrophism) have been proposed," report Buchner and Kenkmann.

The debate has, in fact, reflected a historical divide of ideas in geology over those decades.

On one hand there were the "gradualists" who adhered to the ideathat just about everything we see on the planet today is the result ofgradual processes still at work -- glaciers moving, rains falling,rivers flowing, etc. Gradualism was considered heretical when it was proposed by James Hutton in the late 18th century because it implies the Earth was tremendously older than some Biblical scholars had claimed.

These Biblical scholars cited such catastrophes as Noah's flood toexplain such geological oddities as marine fossils atop mountains.These early "catastrophists" tended to ignore evidence that went against their Biblical interpretation of the geological record. In other words, they weren't very scientific.

As a result, geologists are trained to tread very carefully whereverextraordinary events are being called on to explain geologicalfeatures. The trouble is, of course, there are some things likeUpheaval Dome, which are, as we now know, genuine creations of extraordinary -- albeit non-Biblical -- catastrophic events.

Scientists have determined the Carancas fireball was a stonymeteorite - a fragile type long thought to be ripped into pieces as itenters the Earth's atmosphere and then leaves little more than awhisper of its journey.

Yet the stony meteorite that struck Peru survived its passage mostly intact before impact. "This just isn't what we expected," Schultz said. "It was to the point that many thought this was fake. It was completely inconsistent with our understanding how stony meteorites act."

I've been saying for years now that "Something Wicked This WayComes." I find it curious that this lawsuit comes at exactly the timewhen I am getting deeper and deeper into the research for the series ofComet articles:

In this series, we have learned that there is a lot of evidence thatour planet undergoes cataclysmic bombardment a lot more often than mostscientists and scholars and the general public thinks or believes.

Awareness of the possibility of large impact events on Earth,although long present among a handful of the most imaginative thinkers,has come of age in this century as a result of studies of Arizona'sMeteor Crater and the Tunguska fireball of June 30, 1908, in Siberia,spacecraft observations of cratering on Earth and other rocky bodies,and astronomical surveys of the near-Earth asteroid and cometpopulations. Appreciation of the effects of large impacts has developedin response to these studies and to the unclassified literature on the effects of large nuclear weapons. [...]

[T]he most intensively studied impact phenomenon, impact cratering, is of limited importance, due to the rarity and large mean time between events for crater-forming impacts. Almostall events causing property damage and lethality are due to bodies lessthan 100 meters in diameter, almost all of which, except for the verylargest and strongest, are fated to explode in the atmosphere. ... Since explosions greater than 1 gigaton TNT are rare on this short of a time scale, we are forced to conclude that the complex behavior of smaller bodies is closely relevant to the threat actually experienced by contemporary civilization. [...]

[T]he large majority of lethal events (not of the number of fatalities) are caused by bodies that are so small, so faint, and so numerousthat the cost of the effort required to find, track, predict, andintercept them exceeds the cost of the damage incurred by ignoring them.

(John S. Lewis, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Lunar andPlanetary Laboratory, Co-director of the NASA/University of ArizonaSpace Engineering Research Center, and Commissioner of the ArizonaState Space Commission in: Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth, 2000; Academic Press)

The above statement by John Lewis pretty much sums up theconclusions of all the research into Comet and Asteroid Hazards thathas been going on in a frenzied way for the past 14 years or so. Theones we really have to worry about, the ones that will kill people onthe planet in random, unforeseen disasters, probably can't be seen andare too numerous for it to be cost effective to try to find and dealwith them. In other words, the public is abandoned to their fate. Notonly abandoned, but a deliberate policy of concealment of the facts isclearly in place.

As I have mentioned before, considering the nature of the topic andthe obvious efforts to marginalize it, to cover it up and transfer itto the realm of "crazy conspiracy theories" or worse, we had someconcern about Professor Victor Clube, author of The Cosmic Winter and the paper addressed to the European Office of Aerospace Research and development, dated June 4, 1996, entitled: The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets who seemed to have sort of "disappeared." I wrote in Part Four of this series:

As I have continued to dig into this subject triggered by reading Victor Clube's paper: The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets,it sure appears that I have opened a can of worms. I can report twothings at this point: 1) there is a lot of covert research going onabout this subject; 2) Victor Clube, himself, seems to havedisappeared. We've got some researchers digging on that right now andI'll report back later. It could be the guy just retired, but for themoment, it does seem a bit mysterious considering the things he haswritten on the topic to hand.

It turns out that Victor Clube HAS retired. One of the SOTT editorswho is a climate researcher at a major U.S. research facility undertookto try to find Clube and eventually received a FAXed letter from thegood professor which I am quoting here in part:

2008 Feb 15

[...]

I note that my health is questioned and I hasten to admit itscomparative rudeness! ... In fact I still like to think my apparentinactivity is not quite as total as a google search might be indicating!

First, I should say your references to the (cosmically complacent)paleoclimate community and to my otherwise unread narrative report tothe USAF european office strike a very considerable chord with me.After all neither Ms Victoria Cox nor your good self can be aware howvery much Bill and I had reason to appreciate the timely injection ofUSAF funds at a time when the line of research we championed appeared to be successfully closed down by the UK scientific establishment.Thus we were both in turn obliged to relinquish our career posts at theRoyal Observatory, Edinburgh on account of this line of research -which gave rise to our reincarnation at a more tolerant haven namely myalma mater (Oxford).

Also, whilst I broadly accept your commentary regarding the role of "national elites" in the face of near-Earth threats, Iam quite certain the elites in practice currently know VERY "much LESSthan they let on" and that the situation for humanity is dire.Any comfort you may draw from the opposite opinion seems to me to beentirely misplaced. Thus although the globally modest efforts to assessthe NEO threat with telescopes by a few semi-enlightened nationaladministrations (eg USA) or by a few private enterprises (eg Gates) arecertainly to be commended, I look upon this aspect of the NEO threat asbasically intermittent and therefore more or less symbolic so far asgenerally more urgent and still largely undetected low mass NEO flux(which is demonstrably climatological in its effect) is concerned. Thisparticular threat (evidently responsible for our planet's evolvingglacial/interglacial condition during the past 3 million years) is ofcourse _fundamentally_ ignored by the current Body Scientific and henceby most of humanity as well.

Why is the Body Scientific so misguided? Basically, in my view, because many these days are unaware _two_ secularversions of natural philosophy have arisen since the West's renaissancewhen Plato's works were reintroduced, essentially substantiating azodiacal circulation of gods apparently ancestral to the europeanelite.

Following the invention of telescopes and the undigested revelation that zodiacal gods appeared non-existent (Galileo), the elite began to invoke transcendental divinity whilst rejecting any material circulation or "unmoved mover" occupying interplanetary space. Newton however delved behind Plato to reach Pythagoras etc. and revived the claims for a material circulation in the zodiac (diminished in luminosity) whose encounters with our planet remained a source of recurring providence.

With advancing technology and the improvement of telescopes, thezodiac then revealed the first near-Earth comet (P/Encke) and the firstnot-so-near asteroid (Ceres) thus re-opening the question whether theancient zodiacal circulation comprised near-Earth comets.

An ensuing but very severe crisis then emerged within the Western elite which was resolved ca 1830 in favour of the preferred secular version of natural philosophy (Galileo's) as opposed to the other (Newton's).

I now believe this turn of events was clearly initiated by theRoyal Astronomical Society's official charter in Britain (top nation!)as soon as it agreed _not_ to publish observations of P/Encke eventhough its namesake had already received the Society's highestcommendation.

Arising from the political interference, Newton's unpublished paperswere to remain concealed for at least another century whilstclimatology (like many other branches of knowledge) was never properlyintegrated with Newtonian astrophysics and geophysics.

Once this thread of advancing knowledge is fully appreciated thisintegration may be reckoned to have only recently been attempted withthe publication of an excellent interdisciplinary monograph "Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes" (Springer 2000) by Muller and McDonald (deceased). This seminal climatological workonce again connects climate with a material circulation in the zodiacand can indeed hardly be faulted until it reaches its chapter 7(Accretion climate models). Here, unfortunately, it becomes heavilydependent on a completely mistaken understanding of previously unknowndust bands in the zodiac revealed by IRAS as recently as 1983-4*.

The IRAS team was a typical post-WWII scientific enterprise lastingonly a decade or so and lacking a secure institutional base butinspired and funded by the top nation (USA) for the benefit ofhumanity. Its claims under these conditions, like those forresurrection, were endorsed far too rapidly by the Body Scientific andit was absolutely wrong to suppose _only_ low eccentricity (orbital)material could be invoked in creating these previously undetected dustbands. The IRAS team thus completely failed to associate these bandswith their most obvious source namely the long term progenitor of CometP/Encke.

The upshot of all this is a succession of UK and USastronomical/ cosmological elites skillfully distracting the BodyScientific and humanity for the past 200 years from the most prominentmaterial dominating near-Earth space and controlling Earth's climatefor the past 3 million years (and a no doubt comparable periodin future). The social/political outcome of all this (including thecurrent global warming scare) could be laughable if it were not also sodeep and profound. [...]

* P.S. The authors of these publications both fail to realise theconclusion between our planet's climate and it's spin-orbitdifferential nodal precession must arise on account of its long termorbital resonance with the accretion source (or the ancient music ofthe spheres). As you know, our research builds upon Comet P/Encke'sproximity to such a resonance.

As I have mentioned already, everyone needs to read Clube's books -The Cosmic Winter and The Cosmic Serpent - if you can possibly getcopies. You may have to go to a library to do so. The reason this bookis important is because it gives you a good idea in very realisticterms, of what you may have to deal with at some point in the not-toodistant future... AND, that it is eminently survivable IF you know whatto look for and how to prepare! We aren't talking about a giantasteroid here that is going to create a global wave of firestormdestruction like the movies depict! It's not Planet X or Nibiru! It'sNOT the End of the World (at least not for everybody, but certainly forthose who aren't prepared and happen to be in the line of fire!) Butyeah, it might be somewhat like the Black Death with the loss of halfthe population of one or more continents, or the great Chicago Fire orTunguska or even all of these rolled into one; but all of those eventswere survivable had the victims been informed and prepared. Yes, thereare those who, even had they been informed and prepared would not havesurvived in any case, but we choose the optimistic path: KnowledgeProtects. And we are trying our hardest to give you that knowledge.

The very fact that Bill Gates and others have invested in a seedbank, in an observatory, and all the other things we have discussed inthe past and above suggest to us strongly that they (the rich andpowerful), too, have this sort of future in mind. The very fact thatthe weather has gone berserk, that fireball sightings have increased sodramatically, and even frequent impacts are recorded around the globe,are clues that we are definitely moving into a cosmic dust stream asClube describes, and that such a stream very likely includes somebigger objects - swarms of them - and those "in the know" have takennote and are making preparations to survive. Shouldn't that knowledgebe available to everyone? We think so.

We don't even have to worry about anything having to do with acompanion star and a comet swarm from the Oort cloud which may or maynot be in our future; we only have to deal with the science in front ofus. The science says "Something Wicked This Way Comes."

I'm thinking about turning this series into a book, (and there is somuch more to write about!) but of course, if Eric Pepin prevails in hissuit against me - remember, I'm named personally as a defendant -things don't look too good for that book or future books. One mighteven speculate that the real intent of the suit is to try to seize allmy copyrights, put me so deeply into debt that anything I write everagain will be owed to someone else who will then, we suspect, bury itforever.

That IS a possibility, you know. A real one.

In short, this lawsuit isn't just about some weird guy who gotticked off because a small, obscure forum in a backwater corner of theinternet, generally suppressed by google (that's a whole other story),published some criticisms of his work and way of life - criticismsbased on widely known and publicized events in that life, by the way.Nope. Eric Pepin has got to know that sott.net operates on ashoestring, that there is no gold to be gotten from this source. And,considering my age and lifespan prospects, ole Eric has got to knowthat even if I flipped burgers until I died, he'd never get anything.Never.

So, yeah, this is more than just an attempt to suppress Free Speech. Connect the dots, figure it out.

And if you really want to know what is going on here on the BBM, youreally need to kick yourself into action and either help us out withfunds or with spreading the word about this situation because, peeps,Eric Pepin, whoever is behind him, along with the U.S. legal system,could very well snuff the lighthouse.

You gotta tell me if you want to know, and you gotta do it now. Tellme with actions, not words because, at this point, only actions willsave the words I have yet to write for you, for your children, for allof us.